News

Secrets of Women

Secrets of Women

March is Women’s History Month. To celebrate, we’ll feature a few of our related titles each Friday through the end of the month. First up is an excerpt from Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection by Katharine Park (Zone Books, 2006). Park’s book Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750 (Zone Books, 1998), coauthored with Lorraine Daston, won the Pfizer Prize for the best book in the history of science. Park is Zemurray Stone Radcliffe Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

National Engineers Week: A Q&A with Matthew Wisnioski

National Engineers Week: A Q&A with Matthew Wisnioski

Happy National Engineers Week (February 17-23)! To celebrate, we interviewed Matthew Wisnioski, author of Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America. Matthew Wisnioski is Assistant Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech.

Exiles, Diasporas And Strangers

Exiles, Diasporas And Strangers

Continuing with our series on Black History Month, we’ll take a look this week at African-American painter Jacob Lawrence who is featured in our own Exiles, Diasporas And Strangers, the fourth book in Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts, a series edited by Kobena Mercer. 

Technology and the African-American Experience

Technology and the African-American Experience

Our next post for Black History Month focuses on Technology and the African-American Experience, a collection of essays edited by Bruce Sinclair that examine the relationship between race and technology in American history.  Below are some more details on the book and an excerpt from an essay by Judith Carney, which demonstrates how essential West African slaves were to South Carolina’s lucrative rice plantation economy due to their knowledge and expertise of rice cultivation.

Blues-toned

Blues-toned

Happy Friday! In honor of Black History Month, we’ll post about related titles every Friday throughout February. Last year, we posted an excerpt from Anca Parvulescu’s Laughter that discussed Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and laughter. We’re kicking off this year’s celebration with another excerpt from Laughter; this time focusing on Louis Armstrong and George W. Johnson.

Virginia Woolf on Roger Fry and Chess

Virginia Woolf on Roger Fry and Chess

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf! In honor of Virginia, here’s an excerpt from Rosalind Krauss’ The Optical Unconscious. This passage touches on Virginia’s thoughts on Roger Fry and chess.

Camps

Camps

It’s a crisp 3 degrees in Cambridge this morning, so we’re warming our hands on our coffee mugs and dreaming of summer. For some of us, thinking of warmer days triggers memories of beaches and boats; for others, camping and bonfires. Since today also marks the anniversary of the Boy Scout movement’s beginning (1908), we’re revisiting Charlie Hailey’s Camps: A Guide to 21st-Century Space.

CSEdWeek: A Q&A with Paul Rosenbloom

CSEdWeek: A Q&A with Paul Rosenbloom

Happy Computer Science Education Week! We’ve been posting a series of mini-Q&As with MIT Press authors throughout the week to celebrate. Paul Ceruzzi, author of Computing: A Concise History, along with several other books, kicked us off on Monday, and on Wednesday, we posted a Q&A with Frank Bentley, coauthor (with Edward Barrett) of Building Mobile Experiences. Today’s third and final CSEdWeek Q&A is with Paul Rosenbloom, author of On Computing: The Fourth Great Scientific Domain.

Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street

Reflecting on Occupy Wall Street

Occasionally, a handful of our journals will independently cover the same themes within their pages. It’s been over a year since Occupy Wall Street began, and several of our publications took the opportunity to reflect upon the influence (or lack thereof) of that movement. The editors of TDR, October, and The Baffler have curated 8 pieces on OWS, some of which are freely available to the public and all of which are included in issues available now. We’re also looking ahead to a new Boston Review book, Occupy the Future. This collection of essays, which will be out in February, addresses questions of democracy and equality, and can be pre-ordered now.

CSEdWeek: A Q&A with Paul Ceruzzi

CSEdWeek: A Q&A with Paul Ceruzzi

It’s Computer Science Education Week! We’ll post a series of mini-Q&As with MIT Press authors throughout the week to celebrate. Paul Ceruzzi, author of Computing: A Concise History and A History of Modern Computing, along with several other books, kicks us off.